THE SURVEILLANCE RESISTANCE LAB FIGHTS FOR POWER AND DEMOCRACY, NOT JUST PRIVACY.
Image: Fernando Martí
The Surveillance Resistance Lab investigates and makes visible the often obfuscated ways in which tech increases state and corporate power over our lives—through AI, data collection, and more. By translating research into action, we nurture and accumulate the power of organizing and resistance—locally and transnationally— against technologies of violence and control.
We are senior organizers, researchers and strategists with expertise in legal analysis, corporate investigation, migration control, and domestic policing. We build research, strategy, campaigns, and networks to scale up the ability of communities, workers, and advocates to build power towards a vibrant democracy.
The Challenge
Governments increasingly deploy tech that expands the power of policing and corporations. These infrastructures and tools erode democratic governance and fundamental rights. They threaten the right to dissent and organize, including struggles for migration, racial justice, Indigenous sovereignty, workers’ rights, climate justice, and more.
How We Meet The Challenge
We develop research, strategy, campaigns, and networks around the following areas of work:
Digital PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE & DEMOCRACY
This cross-city and cross-sector strategy is focused on government procurement of technologies that expand surveillance, deepen corporate power, and weaken democracy. This includes technologies with hidden carceral consequences such as mobile driver’s licenses, digital wallets, and centralized benefits distribution portals. We center sites such as schools and hospitals.
Digital Infrastructures of Migration Control
This work builds a transnational network to share knowledge, narratives, and strategies to challenge the Everywhere Border—the digital infrastructure of migration control. We partner with R3D and the Temple University’s iLit to conduct research and build collaborations including organizations in Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, the EU and beyond.
The Internet as an Infrastructure of Control
The Internet as an Infrastructure of Control — This new area of work expands shared understandings of the internet as an infrastructure—including fiber optic cables, WiFi, data centers, platforms and people—increases state and corporate power. It makes visible internet infrastructures and the data collection, labor exploitation, resource extraction that undergird them, so we can build power to fight back.